Link to Post:
http://artillerymag.com/dorothea-tanning/
DeWitt Cheng reviews a recent exhibition of works by Dorothea Tanning at Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
Cheng writes that "Tanning created a forceful combination of erotic danger and allure... A push-pull between attraction and repulsion powers the abstract images of tangled, submerged female figures, flying or falling that evolved in her 'prism' or 'insomnia' paintings from the mid-1950s... In Faith, Surrounded by Hope, Charity, and Other Monsters (1976), there’s an unmistakable similarity to [Max] Ernst’s grattage paintings of the same period, but Tanning’s vision is darker—more romantic and dramatic."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/2013/04/11/the-maestro-who-hated-modernism/
William Poundstone blogs about the late paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
Poundstone writes that recently "De Chirico was the only canonical modernist who spent most of his life proclaiming that modern art was junk. He called for a return to Old Master values as early as 1919, just as his career was taking off. The whole avant garde retreated after the first World War, but no one more decisively (and permanently) than de Chirico... De Chirico’s late career almost reads like a conceptual prank, a deep-undercover Andy Kaufman put-on in which he never broke character. The artist doesn’t crack a smile in his self-portraits, presenting himself as the very model of a major anti-modernist."
Link to Post:
http://benstreet.co.uk/?p=1136
Ben Street blogs about the paintings of Andrew Sendor whose exhibition messages.calendar.camera.jpg is on view at Sperone Westwater, New York, through March 30, 2013.
Street notes that: "Andrew Sendor’s recent paintings describe the future in terms of the past. Interiors that recede efficiently according to fifteenth-century pictorial principles – this in front of that, the doubling shadows of objects in a daylit room – are used to limn a vision not of the secure present or noble past but of the near future. Their stilled, held-breath atmospheres suggest this; their titles confirm it. All is stilled and held: videos stopped at a single frame, figures locked in time. The worldly and religious certainties implied by perspectival space (Jerome’s quill pausing over a translated verse) are inverted. This space is neither religious nor aristocratic: it’s a scaffolding of certainty that allows its opposite to be explored. Sendor’s paintings exist within the strange and contradictory tense of Roland Barthes’ caption in Camera Lucida. Under an image of Alexander Gardner’s photographic Portrait of Lewis Payne is written, almost casually: he is dead and he is going to die. This has happened and this is going to happen. The tension makes the paintings seem clenched, humming."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-voices-the-forgotten-surrealist/
Annette Leddy blogs about painter Wolfgang Paalen, a member of the Dyn Circle of Surrealists, on the occasion of the exhibition Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico at the Getty Museum, on view through February 17, 2013.
Leddy writes that "He brought his writings, his artistic solutions, and his considerable erudition about First Nations and pre-Columbian culture to New York—primarily in the form of the journal Dyn—but those ideas were gradually appropriated by New York artists. As Amy Winter shows in her book about Paalen, Robert Motherwell, who had worked on Dyn and received, as he put it, his “post-graduate education in surrealism” from Paalen, gradually lost a sense of indebtedness to him. Paalen and Motherwell corresponded frequently, often discussing ideas about art at great length, but now that correspondence is nowhere to be found. Barnett Newman, among others, liberally paraphrased his words in his writings about art, and never gave credit."
Submitted by Brett Baker on November 21, 2012
From Rome to Atlantic City, an exhibition of paintings by Margaret McCann, is currently on view at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, through December 7. In works rich in both allusion and painterly craft, McCann merges careful observation, popular culture, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition of painting. To view McCann's paintings is to understand that popular culture has long been a part of the language of painting. Each of McCann's works is an enigmatic parable inside a dynamic formal structure that is animated by a personal sense of touch and color.
McCann recently agreed to discuss her work with Painters' Table.
Margaret McCann, Lookout, 2008 (courtesy of the artist)
PT: I think we have to start by acknowledging that your Atlantic City series has an unanticipated additional reading after Hurricane Sandy. What We Worry? (2009) depicts the sea looming over a spiraling Piranesi-esque Atlantic City boardwalk. Lookout (2008) depicts the boardwalk being inundated by the sea. How do you feel about this unexpected, yet unavoidable new reading?
MM: During Irene “What We Worry?” and “Lookout” were in my show “Boardwalkers” at the Atlantic City Art Center on the Garden Pier, the front of which was washed away in a previous hurricane – you can still see the broken piers. When the nearby Revel was built, huge amounts of sand were added to the beach so the pier is now ‘sand-locked,’ but it used to extend over the water, so I had to temporarily remove all my work during the storm. On a barrier island the weather and water encircle you and the possibility of high water feels ever-present.
Their meaning is probably more journalistic than metaphysical now. At least I painted them before the tragedy (I’d be too self-conscious now), and the synchronicity supports painting’s power and reach - the kind that draws non-artists to painting. But floods are archetypal events, as Guston’s versions express. I was struck by how much my painting “Water Country” resembles the roller coaster washed offshore in Seaside Heights.
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/06/06/andre-masson/
David Carrier reviews the exhibition André Masson: The Mythology of Desire - Masterworks from 1925 to 1945 at Blain/Di Donna, New York, on view through June 15, 2012.
Carrier writes that "if some of Masson’s all-over figurative compositions lead towards Abstract Expressionism, his late 1930s works lead in a very different direction. They anticipate the neo-expressionist painting which made such an impact in New York during the 1980s. His Portrait du poète Heinrich von Kleist (1939) is a truly over-the-top anticipation of Julian Schnabel’s aggressively anti-aesthetic paintings of the 1980s."
Link to Post:
http://structureandimagery.blogspot.com/2012/03/man-ray-painter.html
Paul Behnke posts a surprising selection of paintings by Man Ray. The works demonstrates Man Ray's wide range of approaches and and subjects including moody, modernist landscapes that recall Marsden Hartley's early work, abstractions that call to mind Stuart Davis, and surrealist imagery.
Behnke also posts several quotes from Man Ray about his work including: "I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive."
Link to Post:
http://www.galleristny.com/2012/02/dorothea-tanning-surrealist-painter-and-poet-dies-at-101/
Andrew Russeth reports on the death of Surrealist painter and poet Dorothea Tanning.
Russeth writes that "Ms. Tanning, active as an artist for some eight decades, is perhaps best known for the Surrealist paintings she produced in the 1940s and ’50s. Like Magritte, her work often took the form of realistic depictions of disturbing, surreal situations... Later in her career, Ms. Tanning's work became increasingly abstract, and she experimented with other mediums, like sculpture, printmaking and weaving. By the 1980s, she became increasingly focused on her writing, publishing numerous poems and two memoirs."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/44730/otherworldliness-michael-rosenfeld-gallery/
Brendan S. Carroll reviews the exhibition Otherworldliness at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, on view through January 21, 2012.
Carroll notes that the paintings on view, including works by Federico Castellon, George Tooker, Hughie Lee-Smith, Irving Norman, Jared French and John Wilde, "[strike] a balance between old-master-style rendering and nontraditional use of color and space as well as subversive imagery. Craftsmanship does not undo the peculiar pictures but serves them, adding depth and weight."
Link to Post:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/roberto-matta-pace-gallery-11-18-11.asp
Donald Kuspit reviews the exhibition Matta: A Centennial Celebration on view at Pace Gallery through January 28, 2012.
Kuspit writes: "Matta's last cosmic paintings are less emotional than they seem -- that an emotional reading of them sells their intellectuality short. They are not about the 'mindless' feelings of a surreally deranged and delirious self, but a 'mindful' contemplation of a cosmos in which there is no self."
